March 5, 2007

I know you are all losing significant amounts of sleep fretting about the current status of the epic battle between Jimbo and what apparently is the Mother-of-All-Colds. Here is the absolute latest skinny.

He’s familiar with my routines. As such, being the gentleman and consummate professional that he is, he is patient with my customary flights of self-diagnosis and smartassed comments such as, “If you have a cure for the common cold, I wanna be your business partner. We’ll buy and sell Donald Trump.” He just smiles and goes about his business of checking my blood pressure, checking my lymph nodes, looking in my eyes, ears and down my throat, and listening to my lungs.

When he got to the lungs, he listened and then asked, “You didn’t notice the noises your lungs are making?” Truth is, I had noticed the strange hisses, crackles, pops and “wheeeeeeee” sounds they were making, and I can only assume that when heard through a stethoscope, my lungs must have sounded like a fuel dragster at the starting line.

Without asking my “learned” opinion, he directed that I immediately take a breathing test, presumably to make sure that I wasn’t in the process of suffocating. (The song ”Am I Blue?” comes to mind.) The good news is that, even though my lungs sound like a traffic accident, they are working fine, so there was no need to call the EMS guys.

He prescribed an antibiotic, heading off my anticipated “Antibiotics Don’t Work on Viruses” argument by explaining that the antibiotic will help, because these things are often accompanied by or can result in multiple infections. It was an extremely professional way of suggesting that I ought to consider putting a sock in my yap.